December 11, 2011

Deconstructing the Foundational Myths of Israel

Jay Moore

By this time already, after 60-plus years of heatedly arguing the topic back and forth, is there anything new and insightful to be said that might have a bearing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and help to bring some political and intellectual closure at long last -- at least for those who have an open mind?

Yes, in fact there
actually is! And the left-wing Israeli-born
historian Shlomo Sand, the son of Holocaust survivors, has said it in his book, The Invention of the Jewish People, a book
that first came out in Hebrew in 2008 and which has now been translated and published
in English by Verso Press.

Shlomo Sand goes
right to the heart of the matter. He attacks
and dismantles the foundational myths of the State of Israel that have provided
the Zionists with rationalizations for taking over and occupying the homeland of
the Palestinians, driving a stake right through them. The terms of the discussion should never be the
same again, once people have read and digested Prof. Sand's book.

Firstly, that Jews
were expelled from the Holy Land by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and then
dispersed to various geographical locations around the Mediterranean and beyond.

Secondly, that
the present-day Jewish citizens of the State of Israel are by and large the descendants
of those early Jews. Thus, according to the
logic of the apologists for the establishment of a settler state in Palestine, Jews
are simply (and justly) re-inhabiting the land from which they originally came,
thus finally bringing to a close a long and painful exile.

On the surface,
this argument might seem to have validity -- even if we cannot buy into the chauvinistic
foundational religious myth that Jews are the Chosen People of God and that the
deed to the Promised Land, which they have kept with them all through two thousand
years of their absence, was awarded to them through Abraham and Moses by the Great
Jehovah himself.

First of all, as
Sand points out, while the Roman Empire did brutally put down Jewish revolts in
A.D. 70 and A.D. 135, the Romans were not in the business of ethnic cleansing. Taxes and tribute could only flow into Roman coffers
from people who were continuing to work the land and otherwise laboring. In any case, even if they were so inclined, the
Romans did not have the technological means to accomplish such a dastardly thing.

So where did the
Jewish diaspora come from? Sand's answer
is simple and logical and backed up with ample evidence from the primary and secondary
sources: While it is not so today, Judaism at that time was a proselyting religion
(like Christianity and, later, Islam). The
Jews living elsewhere are mainly the descendants of converted peoples. Ashkenazi Jews (Jews in Eastern Europe) are mainly
descendants of Khazars whose King converted in the 8th Century. Sephardic Jews (on the Iberian Peninsula and North
Africa) come from converted Berbers.

Most of those original
Jews who remained in Israel under the Romans (and after them) converted -- either
for pragmatic or religious reasons -- to Christianity or Islam. Thus, it follows -- if it matters -- that the
closest genetic descendants of these Jews today would be the Palestinians who have
lived there all along -- not 20th century immigrants from Germany, Poland, Russia,
Morocco, or Brooklyn.

The notion of the
"wandering Jew," as Sand shows, was concocted by early Christians who
saw this as divine punishment for the so-called "Christ killers" who had
refused conversion to their new faith. Somewhat
oddly then, given its profoundly anti-Semitic origins, it was taken up later by
the Zionists.

For Sand, Jews
are not a single "People." Jewishness
is not an essententialized, ethno-national identity. Rather it is a religious affiliation (just like
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.). Judaism
in that sense has proved attractive in the past to a variety of different peoples. Accordingly, Jewish communities, in terms of their
cultural, non-religious practices, have differed a lot from place to place.

Sand draws from
the work of Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner on European nation-building during
the 18th and 19th centuries to show how the founders of Zionism like Theodor Herzl,
aided and abetted by an array of historians and intellectuals, invented an "imagined
community" to foster their nationalist project that they thought would save
European Jews from anti-Semitism. They invented
what had never existed before -- a Jewish People.

Today, as Sand
illustrates in his opening chapter with a series of sad and convoluted stories about
persons of his own acquaintance, trying to define who is truly and genuinely Jewish
and thus entitled to citizenship in Israel leads to all kinds of absurdities. In Israel, this determination is left to religious
authorities, but being a Jew by faith is not sufficient, or in some cases, as with
many of the recent immigrants coming from Russia, necessary.

Sand has nothing
but contempt for the repeated efforts of Zionist scientists to identify a "Jewish
gene" held in common by Jews regardless of their diverse cultural backgrounds. In an afterword to a new English-language paperback
edition, Sand declares:

This attempt to
justify Zionism through genetics is reminiscent of the procedures of late nineteenth-century
anthropologists who very scientifically set out to discover the specific characteristics
of Europeans. As of today, no study based
on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific
to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will. It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of
Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly
have been very pleased! And it is all the
more repulsive that this kind of research should be conducted in a state that has
waged for years a declared policy of "Judaization of the country" in which
even today a Jew is not allowed to marry a non-Jew.

Sand deconstructs
one further myth, a contemporary falsehood used to justify the state of Israel,
which is the notion that Israel is a democratic state -- supposedly the only one
existing in the Middle East. If this is a
democracy, Sand notes wryly, it is a rather unusual democracy with special rights,
such as the Right of Return, for its Jewish citizens and not for the 20% who are
Palestinians (not to mention the populations of the occupied territories, non-citizens
who are daily subjected to all kinds of humiliating abuses and land-grabs). (Since the book was written, laws considered by
the right-wing-controlled Knesset would move Israel in an even less democratic direction
-- e.g., criminalizing any discussion of a boycott against Israel or calling into
question the Jewish nature of the state.)

Sand takes what
has come to be known in recent years as a "post-Zionist" position, maintaining
that, while the State of Israel is a given after so many years since its 1948 founding,
it must turn itself into a modern secular state equally representing all of its
citizens, regardless of their religious or ethnic backgrounds. However, how such a transformation might happen,
he does not spell out in any detail.

Shlomo Sand's book,
with its well-documented historical truth-telling, has stirred up a substantial
amount of controversy in Israel. Hopefully,
with this translation, it will do so now in the English-speaking world, especially
among those liberal Jews and Gentiles who continue to think it makes good rational
sense to support the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East -- thereby enabling
with their monetary donations and through their political sway in Washington Israel's
egregious violations of Palestinian rights and the system of apartheid that has
been growing up there.

While it might
be hoped that Sand would have taken a straightforwardly anti-Zionist position, as
does his fellow revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé (the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine)who now
lives in exile because of it, The Invention
of the Jewish People is a book of great and timely importance. It needs to be on the must-read-soon booklist
of every right-thinking and caring person.

Shlomo Sand. The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009.

Jay Moore is a radical historian
who lives and teaches in rural Vermont.